The late 19th and early 20th centuries

As educational opportunity expanded among African Americans after the war, a self-conscious black middle class with serious literary ambitions emerged in the later 19th century. Their challenge lay in reconciling the genteel style and sentimental tone of much popular American literature, which middle-class black writers often imitated, to a real-world sociopolitical agenda that, after the abandonment of Reconstruction in the South, obliged African American writers to argue the case for racial justice to an increasingly indifferent white audience. In the mid-1880s Oberlin College graduate Anna Julia Cooper, a distinguished teacher and the author of A Voice from the South (1892), began a speaking and writing career that highlighted the centrality of educated black women in the broad-gauged reform movements in black communities of the post-Reconstruction era.

African American poetry developed along two paths after 1880. The traditionalists were led by Albery Allson Whitman, who made his fame among black readers with two book-length epic poems, Not a Man, and Yet a Man (1877) and The Rape of Florida (1884), the latter written in Spenserian stanzas.

On August 25, 1893, Whitman shared the platform for African American literature at the Chicago World’s Fair with a 21-year-old Ohioan named Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had just that year published his first volume of poetry, Oak and Ivy. Though not the first black American to write poetry in so-called Negro dialect, Dunbar was by far the most successful, both critically and financially. Deeply ambivalent about his white readers’ preference for what he called “a jingle in a broken tongue,” Dunbar wrote a great deal of verse in standard diction and form, including a handful of lyrics, such as “We Wear the Mask,” “Sympathy,” and “The Haunted Oak,” that testify candidly and movingly to his frustrated aspirations as a black poet in a white supremacist era. The first professional African American writer, Dunbar also authored a large body of fiction, including four novels, the most important of which—The Sport of the Gods (1901)—offered a bleak view of African American prospects in urban America that anticipated the work of Richard Wright.

While most of Dunbar’s fiction was designed primarily to entertain his white readers, in the hands of Harper, Sutton E. Griggs, and Charles W. Chesnutt, the novel became an instrument of social analysis and direct confrontation with the prejudices, stereotypes, and racial mythologies that allowed whites to ignore worsening social conditions for blacks in the last decades of the 19th century. Harper’s Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) attempted to counter specious notions of slavery popularized by white writers who idealized plantation life, while offering models of socially committed middle-class African Americans who exemplify the ideals of uplift that motivated much of Harper’s writing. Griggs, a Baptist minister who wrote five novels and founded a publishing company, excoriatedracism in his fiction, stressing the need for his educated middle-class heroes and heroines to turn away from whiteness as a standard of value and rely instead on self-determination and racial solidarity. Unlike Harper and Griggs, whose fiction won few readers outside black communities, Chesnutt attracted the backing of prestigious publishing houses in Boston and New York. Between 1899 and 1905 he published two books of short stories and three novels of purpose that addressed the causes and consequences of racial problems in the postwar South. Based on the Wilmington, North Carolina, racial massacre of 1898, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) was reviewed extensively throughout the United States as a timely study of troubling contemporary issues, but its commercial success was limited, probably because of its unsparing assessment of white supremacy.

As segregation regimes took hold in the South in the 1890s with the tacit approval of the rest of the country, many African Americans found a champion in Booker T. Washington and adopted his self-help autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), as their guidebook to improved fortunes. Washington portrayed his own life in such a way as to suggest that even the most disadvantaged of black people could attain dignity and prosperity in the South by proving themselves valuable, productive members of society deserving of fair and equal treatment before the law. A classic American success story, Up from Slavery solidified Washington’s reputation as the most eminent African American of the new century. Yet Washington’s primacy was soon challenged. In his landmark collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a professor of sociology at Atlanta University, disputed the main principle of Washington’s political program, the idea that voting and civil rights were less important to black progress than acquiring property and achieving economic self-sufficiency. Unlike Washington, who foresaw the steady obliteration of racial prejudice and discrimination, Du Bois prophesied in the opening lines of The Souls of Black Folk: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” An uncompromising advocate of civil and voting rights, Du Bois asserted in The Souls of Black Folk that through “work, culture, and liberty” the dual heritage of African Americans—what he called “double-consciousness”—could be melded into a force for positive social and cultural change in the United States. Du Bois’s striving to dramatize in his narrator a synthesis of racial and national consciousness dedicated to “the ideal of human brotherhood” made The Souls of Black Folk one of the most provocative and influential works of African American literature in the 20th century.